Spending, Life, Income and Food Updates… 6/4/2012

I hope everyone had a great weekend! It was a pretty good weekend for me. Life seems to be going really good and falling into place quite nicely. Had a girls' night on Friday, hung out with the boy and his friends on Saturday after our 6 year dinner, and then I was extremely lazy on Sunday.

As you can tell from the past couple of food picture weeks, I've been on a big Mexican food kick. I had fajitas again last week.

Friday would've been my dad's 60th birthday so I was definitely trying to celebrate for him. I still think of him everyday of course! It's a lot easier going through things with my sister living here, it's nice getting close to her and hanging out with her.

My updates:

School:Classes start next week! Well technically just one class because my second class doesn't start until the first week of July. I just paid the first half of my summer tuition bill on June 1st, so my bank account is hurting. The other half is due on July 1st. I'm so happy that I won't be taking out any student loans this semester.

Extra Monthly Income:I made around another $350 last week. I had a lot of sponsored posts last week (I think 3) and I'm sorry for this! Hopefully these didn't make you want to run away. However, these are allowing me to pay down debt faster 🙂

$100 of it was from a dinner mystery shop on Saturday. However, it was the boy and I's 6 years this past weekend, so this free dinner came at a perfect time. The dinner was at a nice steak restaurant where I was “required” to drink and eat a HUGE meal. Salad, appetizer, steak, dessert and drinking at the bar.

However, I'm not going to lie, I'm getting tired of mystery shopping. I hate filling out the extremely long surveys after you're done. Sometimes they are short, but for the most part, they make me want to cry. The dinner survey from Saturday was surprisingly short and only took less than 10 minutes, but for other dinner shops I have spent around 30 minutes. How's mystery shopping going for you?

Budget Cutting: Nothing still. I'm so bad with this. However, I am about to get an iPhone in about 2 weeks (because my contract is up to be renewed), so my cell phone bill will actually go up around another $35). I am excited to finally get a phone upgrade though.

Spending:Not a lot of spending here. I did receive a $100 American Eagle gift card and a $50 Walmart gift card from credit card rewards points. I'm going to use the $100 from AE towards swimsuit and other summer stuff. And the $50 Walmart gift card is going to go towards oil for the boy's Jeep.

I'm not sure if I talked about the already, but I also bought 3 return tickets for our flight back from Vegas in August for 2 of my friends and I. I actually had enough (I got 50,000 points from Southwest for signing up for their credit card) for the gift cards above AND 3 return flights. My friends are going to still pay me though even though I used my points. The tickets would've cost $250, but they're going to give me $150 because I could've used the points myself. Either way, we all got a good deal!

And my flight was of course free because I used my points. I would have just used my free airfare from my dad's retirement benefits, but Sundays on the way back are always packed and I didn't want to risk not being able to get home.

How are you with credit card rewards points? I'm not going to lie, I'm extremely addicted to them now! I do need to

Food:We've actually done a lot better this week. I did go to Olive Garden, Chevy's and the restaurant for our 6 year, but we cooked a lot at home. We always make sure that when we do go out, that it's cheap though.

Working out: My friends keep asking me to go to the gym with them, but I always turn them down! I'm just so lazy. I really need to stop being lazy though! I only have classes two nights a week in June, and then 4 times a week in July and a week in August. I will still have TONS of time to workout so I need to get off my lazy butt.

How's your spending, working out and extra income going?

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Hello and welcome!My name is Michelle and I'm the author/owner of Making Sense of Cents. Learning how to save money and make more money changed my life. It allowed me to pay off $40,000 in student loans, start my own business, and I now travel full-time.